~ Used & Collectible Books

A Web Round-up ~

Here is a compilation of tidbits ~ articles, booklists, blogs, etc that I have been storing up through Christmas week; some are now outdated, and also perhaps repeated elsewhere, but here they are ~ all things books, libraries, bookstores and blogging:

Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature by Leonard S. Marcus (Houghton Mifflin, $28): How a 300-year-old question – What should kids read? – became big business.

The Rights of the Reader by Daniel Pennac, illustrations and foreword by Quentin Blake (Candlewick, $16.99): A graceful translation of a 1992 French best seller that celebrates the subversive pleasures of reading.

Between the Covers: The Book Babes’ Guide to a Woman’s Reading Pleasures by Margo Hammond and Ellen Heltzel (Da Capo, $16.95): Two critics assess 600 books in lists that include “books about families more dysfunctional than yours.”

The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia by Laura Miller (Little, Brown, $25.99): A critic re-examines the first book she fell in love with as a 9-year-old, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and “the great reader” who wrote it, C. S. Lewis.

Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America by Jay Parini (Doubleday, $24.95): A cultural history that rounds up the usual suspects (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, On the Road) as well as Mary Antin’s Promised Land, a 1912 memoir by a Russian immigrant.

and another two titles of books about books are sited in this article at The Morning News

*Very Fine Books, a blog for the Easton Press books, posts on “The ‘Why’ of Book Collecting” and offers several must-have reference books for the collector, whether you are new to the game or a seasoned bibliophile [this blog has also changed its format and continues to add new articles daily: see the latest posts on the history of the book and printing…]